Ron Avery
is a retired Daily News reporter and author of "A Concise History of Philadelphia"
I took a horse-and-carriage ride recently through "ye olde historic" Philadelphia. It cost $40 plus a tip, but it was worth every penny for all the great, new - sometimes mind-boggling - historical "facts" provided by my driver.
For instance, I never knew that Dr. Benjamin Rush "killed George Washington by bleeding him and giving him cough medicine with mercury in it."
"Wow," I proclaimed, "I didn't even know that George Washington died here in Philadelphia."
"Yeah, he died in Philadelphia, but he was a very old man at that time," my driver told me.
I also thought I knew how Society Hill got its name, but apparently I was wrong about that, too. The driver said William Penn gave this area to "The Society of Freemason."
One of the most startling revelations was that John Nixon gave Philadelphia's first public readings of the Declaration of the Independence in 1776 in German "because about 60 percent of the population of Philadelphia was German. Then he read it in English."
So many new and interesting "facts" to absorb. They went on and on.
Patriot financier Robert Morris ended up in the debtors prison that he himself had financed and built!
Chestnut Street was lined with chestnut trees. Spruce Street lined with spruce, Pine Street with pines, etc. - because many colonists couldn't read street signs, but they could recognize trees.
Of course, none of the above "facts" are really true, but I didn't contradict the guide. And I didn't reveal that I have been lobbying City Council to educate, test and license Philadelphia tour guides before they are turned loose on the tourists.
I was gathering ammunition in case tour operators claim there is no need for government meddling in their business.
The really sad part of my 30-minute horse-and-buggy tour? My guide was in no way stupid. In fact, he struck me as quite bright. For some reason, he had to drop out of college but planned to return.
He was relatively new on the job. "This is my last day of training," he said, explaining why a supervisor was sitting next to him during the entire ride. She corrected none of his errors, and on a few occasions added more nuggets of nonsense.
It was obvious that his misinformation was the result of his training. He wasn't making this stuff up; he was repeating exactly what he had been taught. That needs to change.
A short time after the ride, I stopped on Fourth Street to listen to a veteran carriage driver instruct his passengers - a mother and her two little daughters - to stop peppering him with questions. He would fill them in during the tour. He said he had 13 years of experience, and would see that they learned everything.
Then he started babbling non-facts about how in colonial days they taxed houses only on their width, not on their length.
City Council should require the testing and licensing of tour guides, just as 10 other American cities do. Most European nations have required licensing for decades. Training sometimes takes a year or more. City Councilman Blondell Reynolds Brown has introduced a bill; a hearing is scheduled for May 10.
Philadelphia's economy depends on its tourism and convention business. For some visitors, the only Philadelphians they will meet during their stay will be waiters, hotel clerks and tour guides. It would be great if those guides were real experts on the city - its historic past and its interesting present.
Too often they sound like blockheads. It's not the guides' fault. Neither their bosses nor the city have ever cared what they said.
Education and testing of tour guides has the potential of ending such inane "information" as Washington is buried in Washington Square; every bell-shaped brick topping the wall around St. Peter's Church graveyard represents a dead Revolutionary War soldier; and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln once ate dinner "together" right here in historic Philadelphia.